On the other hand, pure functional languages such as Haskell often cannot be made to effectively use a bounded set of resources (such as a finite number of cores and memory).

For this particular case, DemandProgress.org had an online petition you could sign. I don't know how effective that is, but it's probably better than nothing and is easier than getting out of your chair.

That's why I always use an encryption algorithm that makes the encrypted data indistinguishable from sectors full of 0 bytes.

I call it "one-way encryption."

http://code.google.com/apis/chart/ perhaps?

Of course that couldn't have anything to do with allergic parents getting the hell off the farm where they were miserable and couldn't breathe and into a relatively sterile city with lower pollen counts, where they pass their hereditary allergies on to their children (some claim 50% of allergies are hereditary).

It seems trite, but apparently it must be said yet again: Correlation is not causation!

On a related note, I've always thought it funny to see speculative theories based on the apparent finding that children with dogs develop fewer allergies. My daughter will certainly never have a dog while she's living with me (I got severe hives and asthma last time I stayed at the house of a friend who has a dog). But she is quite likely to develop severe allergies like me and my father. Coincidence?

The US also has rule of law, a bill of rights, and government checks and balances designed to try to limit how much damage government corruption can do. While it can (and probably does) infringe on people's rights in many situations, these are not carried out at the same scale as in China. The free press and freedom of speech (and communication) means that if it were occurring on any significant scale, you would hear about it. Many people are outraged by Guantanamo Bay, and rightfully so.

Meanwhile, in China, no one even knows about similar or worse abuses even at a much larger scale. And with tighter control of the Internet, adding SSL spoofing to DNS hijacking, GFW monitoring and filtering at egresses, the vast majority of the populace never will.*

* While there remain ways around this (VPNs, for example), those just act as an escape valve for nerd outrage; the majority of people don't understand the problem well enough to care, and will never go to any effort to reach beyond that convenient (filtered) local news source and (monitored) local email, VOIP (special version of Skype for China, folks), chat rooms, SMS (now openly monitored by the phone company "for porn"), etc.

Browsers should warn you if the CA for a site changes. That won't help the situation you describe, nor will it save you if you visit a new site, but at least the typical user visiting a Banana Republic like China can reach his usual email provider safely from his laptop. Unfortunately, those already in such a country are likely out of luck, since who knows which version of Firefox (or Chrome or even IE) they wind up downloading.

Suspicion of an authoritarian regime not answerable to the people it governs != racism.

Or did you miss the lack of outrage about the Taiwan Certificate Authority (TWCA). Same/similar people, different government. Less of a problem.

Exactly. The spoon and the knife are already laid out.

Checkmate.

Forget about "bigotry" or cultural issues or any of that.

The real problem with CNNIC being a CA is independent of politics: a single entity (CCP) controls both your network access (at two points: SOE ISPs and GFW of China) and your SSL certificates (through CNNIC, which is subject to party control).

Game over, man. Forget about privacy.

[CCP=Chinese Communist Party; SOE=State Owned Enterprise; GFW=Great Firewall]

> (Running CGI utilities out of home directories is my favorite that is blocked by SELinux by default.)

Isn't this more properly in the purview of the web server configuration? The only problem is that it's too easy for Jack to change the web server config to allow the thing he thinks he wants to work. All SELinux is doing is making the security configurations too complex for Jack to understand and disable it.

Until he realizes he can just disable SELinux and get those .htaccess files to work the way he wants.